


Life is bigger

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 11:32:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8576863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There is no normal, but there is always breathing.





	

There was small room in his head for contemplation.

He heard a mostly constant rat-a-tat, bullets from minutes and then decades ago, and he put those away in one of the absent rooms of his head, and he breathed in and out.

Breathe in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Hold the breath. 1, 2, 3.

Breath out, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Hold it. 1, 2, 3.

Fall into a rhythm and then gradually learn to hold it, to expand it, to breathe deeper from the core and not from the bird-rattling-in-a-cage place in the top corner of his ribs.

Breathe in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Hold the breath. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Breath out, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Hold it. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

In between breaths there was room for contemplation.

He wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to be contemplating, he only knew that he must. Somewhere in his tire-tread of a head was something useful and important. But there was so much _mud_ , and his footsteps slogged and he became trapped in mires of what might have been memory, and when he looked behind him for clarity he saw only a thousand tracks. The fossilized tracks of _panzers_ and _jackboots_.

Even those would be lost in the snow.

Winter came and James Barnes lost himself quietly in the muffling of white powder, packing itself into the soles of his shoes, drifting over the back of his hood to be shaken off at the doorstep. It created cold and foreboding memories in the metal of his arm. Without regular maintenance, it became stiff, and he was too… queasy to care for it. The realization of his freedom had yet to set in, and the consequences of that freedom eluded him for far too long.

It took two men and their guns to wake him up. They didn’t have any jackboots, they didn’t have gewehrs or karabiners, and they didn’t have uniforms. They had a glock 19 and a sawed off shotgun.

“Empty your pockets,” said one of them.

It didn’t occur to him at first that he was being robbed. He was confused about why they hadn’t shot him immediately. He deserved it; he had already been courting death in starvation and agoraphobia, and he had wasted away until his false arm bulged comically in contrast to the real one. Basic human maintenance had eluded him until he reached this point.

“Right now,” barked the other, and kicked him in the back of the knees.

His metal arm reflexively separated the man’s frontal and parietal bone, and just the thumb pushed one temple in until there was no room left in the socket for its eye.

That main died. He was killed by the decades of frozen brain and snow and mud that had accumulated in the winter soldier’s head, and James Barnes felt the man drop through the darkness in the alley, and he knew that he was dead in the same way he knew what it felt like to bite into an apple, or pick up a plum. Some things you were born knowing. Like breathing.

Other things you learned.

The man with the glock 19 fled in terror and disbelief, which made sense. He had seen one of the only real bogeymen. He had probably convinced himself that they didn’t exist.

James Barnes had almost forgotten, himself.

That night in the tiny dingy apartment, where there were bones of old meals and scars of wastepaper cluttering the corner, where there were notebooks frazzled and half torn where he had tried to arrange his thought, where there were books and a stove that didn’t work and a mattress on the floor and no windows, where he paid rent in cash in a yellow envelope slipped through a hole in the walls, pain made him remember.

The un-maintained arm had wrenched itself almost out of the socket in its rush to take a human life.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to pull off his shirt, with fingers that shook uncontrollably. His whole torso spasmed with pain. His body wasn’t used to doing this. Not anymore. In all his breathing and counting and trying to make room in his head, his strength had abandoned him and his muscles were utterly wrenched.

It was not the worst pain he had ever felt, far from it, but this pain came with an ice cold stab of realization.

That which he had been contemplating, consolidated.

Later he would buy opiates off the street and they would help until his muscles healed, but for now there was nothing to dull his body or his mind, nothing to shelter him from the raw horror of knowledge come cold and glass-clear in that birdcage of his ribs.

He heard his lucid voice in the back of his head for the first time in years.

Said Bucky scornfully, as if it should have been obvious:

_There is nobody coming to take care of you._


End file.
